The Vanishing Half: A Novel by Brit Bennett

said, clasping their mother’s hands. “Let us lighten your load.”
    The twins pressed against their bedroom door, listening hard, each wondering if she would be the one to go. Would Aunt Sophie take her pick, like choosing a puppy out of a basket? Or would their mother decide which daughter she could live without? Eventually, their mother told Aunt Sophie that she could not separate her girls, but later, Desiree learned that her aunt had asked for her. Aunt Sophie lived in Houston, and Desiree used to imagine her life there, a city girl whisking around in starched dresses and shiny leather shoes, not the faded calico her mother salvaged from the church bin.
    After Mallard, Early said, he was sick of farming other people’s land, so he set off to Baton Rouge to try his luck. Well, the only luck he found was the hard kind. He spent a year there, stealing car parts in order to feed himself, until he got caught and shipped off to Angola State Prison. He was twenty then, already a man in the eyes of the law and truth telling, he’d felt like a man since the night his parents left him without saying good-bye. The world worked differently than he’d ever imagined. People you loved could leave and there was nothing you could do about it. Once he’d grasped that, the inevitability of leaving, he became a little older in his own eyes.
    He spent four years in prison, a time he leapt over and would never, in all his life, talk much about.
    “Does that change anything?” he asked her.
    She imagined him in a phone booth somewhere, his boot kicked up on the glass.
    “What would it change?” she said.
    He was quiet a minute, then said, “Oh, I don’t know.”
    But she knew what he meant: would she think about him differently now? She wasn’t sure what she thought about him at all. She’d had a crush on him once, long ago, but she didn’t know the man he’dgrown up to be. She had no idea what he wanted from her. Weeks before, he’d offered to find Stella, and when she told him that she couldn’t pay him right away, he said, “That’s all right.”
    “What you mean that’s all right?” she said.
    “I mean, I don’t need it right off. We can work somethin out.”
    She’d never met a working man who was so casual about his money, but then again, she’d never met a working man who did what Early did for a living. He hunted bail jumps who’d disappeared without a trace, hoping to start over somewhere new. But there was always a trail if you looked closely enough—no one disappeared completely. Again, she thought about the envelope of photographs he’d given her. In the diner, she’d held the package, her heart thudding.
    “Don’t worry,” he’d said. “I’ll send that sonofabitch far away from here.” She must have looked unsure because he said, “Trust me. I won’t give you up.”
    But why wouldn’t he? He barely knew her and Sam had offered him good money. What reason did he have to be loyal to her? For weeks, she’d wondered if she and Jude should move on again. If Sam was looking, wouldn’t he eventually find her? Wouldn’t he just travel to Mallard himself? But maybe now, Mallard was the safest place to be. Sam’s hired man told him she wasn’t in Louisiana, and what reason would Sam have to doubt him? Maybe she could trust Early—if he’d wanted to hurt her, Sam would have found her already. But just because she could trust him didn’t mean that he didn’t want anything.
    “He just tellin you what you wanna hear,” her mother said one night, handing her a wet plate. “That man don’t know where Stella is any more than you do.”
    Desiree sighed, reaching for the dish rag.
    “But he knows how to look,” she said. “Why shouldn’t we try?”
    “She don’t want to be found. You gotta let her go. Live her life.”
    “This ain’t her life!” Desiree said. “None of it woulda happened if I didn’t tell her to take that job. Or drag her to New Orleans, period. That city wasn’t no